The E.U. Is Democratic. It Just Doesn’t Feel That Way.

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From left, standing, President François Hollande of France, Prime Minister Charles Michel of Belgium and Prime Minister Xavier Bettel of Luxembourg at a European Union summit meeting in Brussels on Wednesday. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, right, and Prime Minister Beata Szydlo of Poland are in the foreground.CreditPascal Rossignol/Reuters

Leaders of the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union have proclaimed last week’s historic vote as a victory for democracy. The union, they often argue, is elitist and undemocratic. The only way for member states to regain full control is to quit outright.

The reality is more complicated. Scratch the surface, and it becomes clear that neither the European Union’s very real problems nor the criticisms of the bloc are really about anything as straightforward as elections or representation. This is a debate about democracy, but in a way that is both more meaningful and harder to define than how we usually think of it.

Technically, the European Union has quite a lot of democracy going on.

The European Parliament, often referred to as the “lower house” of the union’s legislature, is directly elected, via free and fair elections in the 28 member countries, every five years. Every European Union citizen of voting age is entitled to cast a ballot to select a representative. The legislature’s 751 seats are apportioned by the bloc’s treaties.

The Council of the European Union, or “upper house,” consists of representatives sent by the governments of member states. They are not directly elected, but the governments that send them are. Likewise, the members of the European Council, which sets the European Union’s policy agenda, are the elected leaders of member states.

These bodies, in turn, appoint and confirm a number of civil servants, as well as members of groups such as the European Commission. While these officials are both powerful and unelected, the process is not different from many democracies. The United States, for example, does not directly elect its secretary of state or, for that matter, any State Department functionary.

So while defenders of the European Union have evidence to show that the bloc is democratic, this misses the point. Democracy, after all, is about more than elections. It’s also about accountability: whether the government is responsive to the citizenry.

Yes, the European Union has elections (and, yes, like the United States, participation has been less than 50 percent for many cycles). But, in a functioning democracy, popular will is also expressed through mechanisms other than marking ballots.

The European Union, perhaps in part because it was designed by technocrats rather than developing organically, does not account for or often even allow those mechanisms. And this is why, for many Europeans, the body does not feel democratic.

The trouble with technocracy

Some of this is by design. Although its legislature is elected, the union is in many ways a technocracy first. It was designed to be an institution that allows experts to make the best decisions possible, simultaneously rising above and defusing nationalist politics.

The ultimate goal of the project has always been a peaceful, united Europe. Protection from politics was supposed to help achieve that. Nationalist rage, after all, once allowed the rise of fascists and Nazis. The European Union was designed to prevent that from happening again.

But politics has its benefits. It’s an avenue by which people can express their will and institutions can respond; this, in some ways, is what real democracy is all about.

Day-to-day politicking is often treated as an unseemly distraction from the “real” work of legislating. But while politics isn’t always a pretty process, it is an essential one.

In democracies, when there is a contested issue, elected officials and interest groups from all sides argue it out in public view, in the media, on the floor of the legislature or both.

Even if your side loses, you have seen the process play out, and maybe even participated in it by signing a petition or attending a protest. You feel included because your representative argued for your interests. If your lawmaker didn’t do that, you can vote him or her out, but you don’t need to throw out the whole system.

The European Union doesn’t work like that, so it doesn’t feel as democratic. Its decisions seem remote, its leaders unreachable. So when people are unhappy with Europe’s decisions, it is easy for them to believe that it’s because Europe — some vague, amorphous body — did not listen to them, and perhaps does not even care about them.

That sentiment has led to “Euromyths,” a genre of urban legends about European regulations that gained traction during the British referendum campaign. One claimed that London’s beloved double-decker buses were to be banned, another that “fish and chips” would have to be written in Latin on menus, another that bananas would be required to be straight.

The subtext of those stories was that the European Union was not only threatening British culture, but doing so carelessly — that the Brussels bureaucrats imposing those regulations didn’t care or maybe even understand that their decisions would take away something culturally important, and that there was no way for ordinary citizens to reach or influence them.

Those feelings apply to more important decisions too: migration and financial bailouts for troubled member states, to name a couple. People in Britain and other countries, feeling that the European Union is blithely ignoring their political will, have responded by expressing that will more forcefully than ever.

The union was designed to overcome national politics, but has actually fostered more of it — much as the historian Tony Judt predicted in a 1996 essay that now seems chillingly prescient.

“We may wake up one day to find that far from solving the problems of our continent,” Mr. Judt wrote back then, “the myth of ‘Europe’ has become an impediment to recognizing them.”

A problem of weakness

The thing that makes this problem so severe is not that the European Union is too strong, but that it is too weak.

Consider the unfolding migrant crisis.

Because the union lacks institutions muscular enough to either design or implement a Europe-wide policy, its officials have resorted to begging and cajoling member states to voluntarily resettle more refugees — and those states have largely refused. The resulting compromises haven’t made anyone happy, and have left certain states, particularly Greece and Italy, bearing the brunt on their own.

Such compromises compound the sense that the bloc does not represent actual Europeans. Negotiations that attempt to balance the interests of more than two dozen distinct societies often yield unsatisfying solutions.

This feels undemocratic because someone in, say, France, sees that European Union policy differs from the French national will.

That feels like French democracy is being overridden by a remote, unresponsive entity, and there is nothing the French can do about it.

So member states end up inevitably thwarting one another’s democratic desires: The people of Greece want something different than do the people of Germany. But Greece is affected by Germany’s policies, and vice versa.

As long as the European Union is strong enough to put them in conflict but too weak to create a solution, it will feel, in some sense, undemocratic.

Correction:

An article on June 30 about reasons that the European Union seemed undemocratic to those leading the British campaign to leave it misidentified the body whose members are appointed by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. It is the European Commission, not the European Council.

Follow Amanda Taub on Twitter @amandataub.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Why the E.U. Lacks the Feel of Democracy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe